Currently, mobile content players for receiving and playing push content are associated with a single content server and will receive content from that server only. This current model for mobile content providers or publishers is limited. If the content provider or publisher relies on a web site other than the content server, then the user must navigate to that web site to select content and manually retrieve the content. If the content provider or publisher relies on email to communicate the content availability to the user, the user must still navigate to the content, such as by travelling to an embedded URL, and retrieve the content. If the content provider or publisher provides an RSS feed for the user, this still requires the user to select the content and retrieve it at that time. The conventional approaches to viewing push content have several restrictions including: (a) The user is limited to only the content available from the initial host on the mobile content player and no other; and (b) Many content management systems can assign content access to a user or make it available anonymously, but then require the user to retrieve the content from the content server. In order for a user to retrieve a webpage, for example, the user has to find the webpage and pull the content down, in a manner similar to RSS feeds where the user initiates the selection and pulls the content. The RSS feeds update the topic list but the user has to pull the actual content.
With existing systems, content providers cannot direct content but the providers can send an email with an embedded link and require user to pull the content; or the providers can make RSS feeds or web sites available that the user can search for. With these approaches, the user does not always know whether the content is new. With conventional approaches, it is the client or the client's mobile device that must poll the server to check for new content. With conventional approaches, the communication is unidirectional with no feedback provided when the user pulls down content. These conventional approaches use anonymous access and no tracking can be performed to track which user looked at which materials. The only current method for tracking content consumption through email involves read receipts and this only tells the content provider that the user has accessed the email. The conventional methods waste processing and battery resources on the wireless device while the user must take additional steps to retrieve the content using a pull mechanism, and also waste the user's time.
It would be desirable to have a method for delivering push content to mobile devices that addresses at least one of the above-noted concerns.
It will be noted that throughout the appended drawings, like features are identified by like reference numerals.